Chinese Democracy is (pretty much) the last Old Media album we’ll ever contemplate in this context. Artists will continue to make “albums,” but only as a gimmick or a packaging device. This is the last record that will be marketed as a collection of autonomous-but-connected songs, the last album that will be absorbed as a static manifestation of who the band supposedly is, and the last album that will matter more as a physical object than as an Internet sound file. This is the end of all that, partially because the recording process started five years before those specific qualities even had
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